The Things that Travel: On Tradition and Modernity in Latin America

Abstract

According to conventional understanding, modernity is the name given to an epoch of European history that marks the passage from the age of revelation, where to produce means to discover or reveal the already given, to the age of production, understood as the techno-scientific invention of something hitherto unknown, an age bound up with the new value placed on humanitas. Leaving aside for a moment the question of whether such a definition is or is not Eurocentric, recent work on Latin American modernity done under the aegis of cultural studies defines modernity differently.¹ This definition has not been sufficiently discussed. In contrast to the idea of European modernity as an epoch beginning sometime around the year 1500, Latin American cultural studies holds that modernity arrives in the region not before the end of the nineteenth century and possibly as late as the 1920s and 1930s (Sarlo, Martín-Barbero) or even the 1950s (García Canclini, Brunner).² In short, Latin American modernity is a child of the Second Industrial Revolution.